Ep24 The Adobe AEM Champion Program: What does it mean, what's it like, and how can you do it too?

The 2026 Adobe Summit Conference is a wrap! It can be said with certainty that if you continue into 2026 with the same mindset as you've had in years past, your company will positively be left in the dust. There are so many marketing technology accelerants right now, and we try our best to sum them up in our post-Adobe-Summit podcast.  We answer:  What were the top new announcements at Adobe Summit this year? What should every AEM-focused company know about the advancements in the AEM space? Are Adobe's new Agentic tools ready for prime time, and are they worth knowing about?

Adobe has a fascinating new product in LLM Optimizer, which promises to address a whole new category of use-case in optimizing for LLM searches or "GEO - Generative Engine Optimization" as marketing likes to call it. The real questions though: does it work? Do you need it? We put LLM Optimizer to the test on our own site with some interesting experiments, to see if it might help with problems faced by usual AEM & Edge Delivery Services implementations. Arbory Digital's Hank Thobe is joined by EDS Developer and Designer Extraordinaire Frank Townsend, as well as 2X AEM Champion Tad Reeves to discuss whether or not you should be giving Adobe LLMO a serious look.

Marathon but WORTH YOUR TIME. In this episode, we interview Chris Millar, Architect at Adobe responsible for “Document Authoring” (DA) in Edge Delivery Services (formerly known as Project Dark Alley). The discussion explores Chris’s role in developing document-based authoring tools for Adobe’s Edge Delivery platform, the challenges with traditional Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), the origins and evolution of DA as a skunkworks project, its integration with tools like SharePoint and S3, internal adoption at Adobe, success stories (e.g., rapid site launches for large-scale projects like school systems), trade-offs with features like WYSIWYG editors, extensibility, performance focus, and future visions involving […]

Three AEM/Edge Delivery-focused events happened in rapid succession at ‪@AdobeDevelopers‬ Headquarters in San Jose: the Adobe Champions Forum, a first-ever Edge Delivery Masterclass put on by Adobe Consulting, and the ‪@aem-live‬ Developers Live event. 0:00 Introduction and Welcome to Episode 261:02 Overview of the Three Adobe Events at HQ2:08 Adobe Champions Forum Highlights and Swag3:29 Edge Delivery Masterclass Experience5:47 Comparing These Events to Adobe Summit7:21 15th Anniversary of AEM and Key Product Takeaways8:37 The Shift to Dual Engagement (Humans + Agents)10:05 AI Agents, SEO Changes, and Content Reformulation13:22 Agents in Content Production and Delivery17:43 LLM Interactions with Sites and Speed […]

The adaptTo() 2025 conference is in the books! If you’re an AEM / Edge Delivery technologist, product owner or recruiter – what should YOU know is coming down the pike this year to prepare for? Tad Reeves is joined by Kamil Chociej from ‪StreamX and Bartłomiej Gątarski of Dynamic Solutions to discuss our favorite ‪adaptTo() sessions and what they mean to the world of Adobe Developers‬ and ‪Edge Delivery Services.

Principal Architect Tad Reeves was just named as an Adobe AEM Champion for the second time, and shares insights on:

Veteran DevOps Architect Dwayne Hale and AEM Developer Chase Hollander discuss strategies for cloud cost optimization by consolidating onto tools you possibly haven’t considered.

There is almost certainly a problem with your website in China, and it’s affecting over a BILLION potential visitors. Nearly 90% of web architects surveyed have NO IDEA how their websites perform in China, and the results of not understanding the problem could be costing you dearly. 2X Adobe Champion Tad Reeves & StreamX co-founder Marta Cukierman dissect the problem of China web performance, why so many businesses continue to not solve for it, and the effective things you can do about it.

[Note: we’re Framework fans but were not paid in any way for this podcast, we just happen to feel strongly about repairable and upgradeable hardware] As a break from our regularly-scheduled podcasts on Adobe Experience Manager & infrastructure, long-time DevOps nerds Dwayne Hale & Tad Reeves geek out about what makes repairable laptops from Framework such an amazing option for standardizing upon for company gear.

How much do you know about AEM Forms? The entire purpose of SO MANY websites boils down to a successful form experience, and yet all too often it’s only the visual impact of the site that gets all the attention, not the core experience and plumbing that constitutes the business case for the site’s whole existence. This episode dives DEEP into AEM Forms, and what you should know about architecture of a great Forms experience.